


A Sense of Fatal Allegiance

by propergoffic



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game), Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Addiction, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - World of Darkness (Games) Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dubious Consent, F/F, HIV/AIDS, Mind Control, Minor Original Character(s), Multi, Murder Mystery, Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Rewrite, Suicide, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 23:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30147012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: Rachel and Chloe finally get out of Arcadia Bay, and they're living the dream just like they planned - but it's not all wine and poses on the pier. It’s creepy neighbours, and running out of money, and getting desperate, but you know what the worst thing is about living in Santa Monica?All the damn vampires.
Relationships: Damsel (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines)/Chloe Price (Life Is Strange), Fledgling (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines)/Chloe Price (Life Is Strange), Fledgling/Jeanette Voerman, Fledgling/Nadia Milliner, Mira Giovanni/Nadia Milliner, Rachel Amber/Chloe Price, Rachel Amber/Jeanette Voerman, Rachel Amber/Therese Voerman, Vandal Cleaver/Nadia Milliner, Vandal Cleaver/Therese Voerman
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	A Sense of Fatal Allegiance

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Prisoners Of Our Own Device](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13339302) by [vonquixote (propergoffic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/vonquixote). 
  * Inspired by [Desert of Ghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12313323) by [rednightmare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare). 



> “I’ve spent plenty of time in Los Angeles. It’s a big flat place, dusty from no rain, roads are bad and lots of people are trying to get by. Too many people, too badly managed. They go about it with a sense of fatal allegiance and, like anywhere, they pretend there is no alternative.”  
> — Chris Onstad
> 
> *****
> 
> Actual writing by propergoffic, beta and plot determinants by WellHarkAtHer.
> 
> A self-remix/revised standard version of ‘Prisoners Of Our Own Device’ and its sequels. You absolutely do not need to have read those, although if you have, the opening chapters might be somewhat familiar. They got rather out of control and bogged down; they were carrying far too much of my baggage as a player and scholar of the VtM tabletop to ever work as a conclusive fic. 
> 
> This should read fine if you're a Life Is Strange fan who doesn't know their Ascension from their Oblivion, or an old hand at the World of Darkness who's not sure who the hell these teenagers are or what they're doing here.
> 
> This revision is still heavily indebted to the superb ‘Desert of Ghosts’ by rednightmare, but not actually trying to *be* ‘Desert of Ghosts’ (this time). There is a standard-issue vampire political intrigue going on in the background, but the fic is really about the way vampires treat their ghouls, and how ghouls deal with their vampires.
> 
> This one has a stricter limit on character perspective than ‘Prisoners’ et al (we are following four non-vampire characters, and anything they don’t get to witness, I don’t get to write) and a plot outline, to which I intend to stick (this time).
> 
> It treats the events of VTMB’s Camarilla ending as canonical (with a female Tremere PC), but its treatment of the vampire condition, powers, clans etcetera is closer to tabletop’s V5. Violence hovers somewhere between the two canons; LIS fans may find it excessive, VTMB fans should find it… comparatively restrained.
> 
> Sex and shipping and slash policy is… well, blood drinking and biting and mind whammy are all somewhat sexual, sufficiently intimate and intense and controlling that it seems best to tag all the relationships with a slash and let you, dear reader, be the judge.
> 
> I've tried to strike a balance between "eww spoilers" and "how dare you not warn for X" in the tags and I hope I managed it. I don't really believe in spoilers anyway (as if plot is the only reason to read anything ever - pshaw to that) but I know they're make or break to a lot of readers.
> 
> Comments help me keep momentum and are absolutely welcome.

"This is _hella_ skeezy," says Rachel.

Chloe - whose last few nights have been spent in the concrete den in their junkyard back home or the back of her truck, at a stop just outside LA, so it’s not like she has high standards - looks around the apartment. It’s some ill shit. What isn’t grey with damp is slick with grease. Slabs of chipboard have been nailed behind the windows - on the inside, they’re crawling with faded psychedelic swirls of spray paint. 

While Rachel opens doors - cupboards, TV cabinet, tiny bathroom - Chloe’s taking stock. Desk: in the corner, framed by windows she can’t see through. No chair. Bed: mattress sagging half off and half through the iron frame. Refrigerator: also known as ‘cheap steak graveyard’, by the look of those stains. 

Rachel opens the bathroom door, blinks like she’s not sure what she’s seeing, and shuts it again, throwing her bag down onto the least sticky square yard of carpet she can see and flopping down on it. "What if… we burn it down and start over?"

“Can’t. We spent all my money on gas and all your money on this shitbox. If you want insurance, someone’s selling a kidney.”

“It’s your turn for the surgical scars.” Rachel grins, and Chloe grins back. It’s a shitbox, but it’s a shitbox _here_ , and she’s here, and Rachel’s here, and she’s so fucking beautiful that nothing else seems real.

Chloe realises she’s staring. She finally drops her gym bag and walks into their apartment - theirs, together - and she wraps her arms round Rachel’s head and holds it tight against her hips and for a moment they’re on stage at Blackwell again, and someone behind the lights screams ‘say yes!’ and Chloe does, with all her heart, and means it.

“We made it. Santa fuckin’ Monica. I bet we can see the pier from here if we take these stupid boards down.”

“It’s everything I ever dreamed of,” says Rachel, deadpan.

“It’ll be fine. It’s four walls and a roof. C’mon, let’s get the rest of the stuff.”

They open the door straight on to their neighbour - or at least to a guy standing in the doorway of 507. He's small, but toned, with scruffy brown hair down to his collar and dark circles under his eyes. No shirt under his hospital scrubs, and he might look OK if he got about six years’ sleep. Shame about the voice; it’s stilted, sing-song, distant, and comes coupled with a creepy shit-eating smile at Rachel as she tugs Chloe’s hand and leads her out.

"Ah, shit. You see me, Jane Doe?"

"Excuse you?"

His gaze flickers up to Chloe, and down. Avoidant. Defiant. "You too, Firebird? You want to watch out. You can't keep coming back forever."

"How fucking high are you?"

"Sky high. Higher than you'll ever go. Never close to the sun, though. Never there." He laughs. It’s a horrible sound, bubbling out of his lungs, pure horror movie. The kind of laugh a badly-disguised serial killer laughs.

“See? He’s just blazing.” Chloe rolls her eyes right as Rachel flashes her a glance - almost like they planned it, and Rachel probably did. “Pun intended.”

"Keep that happy smiling face while you can. You'll always end up screaming, little blue.”

"Is that a threat?”

He sways, clutches his doorframe, and shakes his head, as though Chloe actually hit him, didn’t just twitch and check herself. Rachel folds her arms, looks him up and down properly.

“OK, Mister Cryptic,” she says, “here’s one for you: creepers die alone.” 

Chloe bites down on her snigger, but she can’t keep the grin inside, or herself from joining in. “Alone; unloved; unremembered; jerking off in dark alleyways.”

He snorts. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He slams the door behind him; maybe Chloe’s imagining it, but it feels like dust falls, like the crappy plastic potplant at the end of the hall quivers to the roots it doesn’t have. Suddenly, she’s so glad she didn’t take the shot.

“Man. He has one hell of a crankin’-it arm.” Chloe rubs her forehead, leaning back against their door.

“Must have been something we said.” Rachel holds out a loose fist, and it’s not like Chloe can leave her hanging; she bumps it. “Good work. Let’s go.”

She’s halfway down the corridor before Chloe’s standing up straight, bobbing along in her wake, giving one last look over her shoulder as they turn the hall corner and head downstairs. The door to 507 stays resolutely closed, but Chloe keeps looking back.

The shitbox is on the top floor of an old three-storey building on an unfashionable back street, somewhere back from Wilshire Boulevard. Chloe’s ancient F-150 — it’s older than she is, and she’s honestly surprised it survived the drive down 101 — is backed onto the pavement, and in a small mercy, the guy from the pawnshop on the bottom floor is still watching it. Rachel’s boo-boo eyes are that powerful, apparently; Chloe’s still impressed by her _small town girl come to seek her fortune_ act and she’s seen Rachel rehearse it for two years.

Pawnshop guy — his name’s Trip, or at least that’s what he answers to — is transparently baked, all dark baggy eyes and goatee that’s seen better decades. He reminds Chloe of Skip, a little, and she comes down on that trace of homesickness hard. So what if she knows a guy like him? There’s a stoner guy like him in every teen movie, maybe every town for all she knows. This one seems cool, though: he dragged his ass out of his little wire cage and onto the street to do them a favour, at least. Between loads — the books and potplants are Rachel’s, the records are Chloe’s, and their DVDs have been hopelessly entangled since last summer — they do the _whole so where you from, whatcha doing here_ routine. 

“Oregon,” he drawls, when they’ve all but shown him Arcadia Bay on a map. “Cool. I knew a girl from there, few years back. She went… everyone said the Slasher got her, but I think she just went home. Boyfriend trouble. Weird vibe on those two, ‘f I’m honest.”

“Speaking of weird vibes,” Chloe says, nodding and smiling, settling in to the all-potheads-together groove, “what’s with that guy in 507?”

“Vandal? Man, he’s… he works across the street, at the Med Centre. Night porter. I don’t think he’s seen daylight since the Nineties.”

“Is he on something?”

“Not that I know,” says Trip. “Just… messed up. Everyone else here’s chill, though. Miz Keegan in 505, she’s been here years, longer’n me, moved here after her old man died and paid the place up ‘til doomsday. 506 is some guy named Nivbed. Think he works up the Boulevard, maybe something Hollywood. I don’t ask, y’know?”

That’s that, for the moment. Four more loads of mostly clothes and keepsakes (Chloe will not, under any duress, admit that Mr. Sharkey is buried deep in the last one), and Chloe finds herself praying for a storm; it’ll clear the air, and it’ll save her from having to use their apartment’s evil-looking mould-prison of a shower. And everything’s going according to plan, right up until Chloe tries to start the truck and move it somewhere off the street. Two tries with the key, one with the wires, and Chloe steps down from the cab with a shake of her head.

“Oh God,” says Rachel, “don’t tell me she got all the way here and died on the doorstep.”

“Hold on.” Chloe puts a finger to Rachel’s lips even as the pout is forming, and thumps the hood open. “So… the distributor’s distributed itself all over the fucking place, and there’s something oozing out of… oh, shit…”

“But… you can fix it, right?”

“Well, yeah, eventually, but it’ll take more than Scotch tape and popsicle sticks this time. Most of this stuff’s on the legs after its last legs. Even if I could put it all back together… we’d arrive in bits. And the bits would be on fire.”

“Fucking great.” Rachel slumps back against a lone ornamental tree, planted rather sadly at the mouth of the alley leading down past Trip’s pawnshop to their door. Trust her to find the most melodramatic slouching spot, everywhere she goes. “So now what the hell do we do?”

“We stick a note on the windshield,” says Chloe, “and then we find a diner or something, ‘cause the banshee screams for street-legal meat and I can’t plan when I’m hungry.”

“Deal. I can’t face that bathroom on an empty stomach.”

* * *

If the Surfside Diner ever had life, it’s dead now. A certain familial pride rises up in Chloe as she sweeps familiar-yet-not, everywhere-yet-nowhere, anywhere-but-here features; swivel stools, booths, payphone (she clocks it because the wall around it’s riddled with holes, and because who in the hell has a payphone in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Thirteen anyway?). There’s a big nervous guy with red hair behind the counter and a small woman with hair the colour and face the approximate texture of an iron bar making him a lot more nervous. Clientele is washed-up surfers and washed-out locals, a lot of overalls and no suits and only one cop, who’s half asleep on his stool anyway. Nobody looks like a tourist, and Chloe had half expected the room to freeze and everyone to turn and stare when the door swung shut behind them.

It had not. Maybe they were trusting the food to finish the strangers off for them.

“You know what we should do?” says Rachel, in between mouthfuls.

Chloe stabs a hash brown like it’s personally offended her - to be fair, these hash browns are offensive, not the rock on which a good diner breakfast is built at all - and considers the matter. “Nope.”

“Paint this town red.”

“On our combined budget of… I’ve got fourteen bucks.”

“That gives us… twenty-three dollars, cash money.”

“Right,” says Chloe, as the unattended potato mush topples from the end of her fork. Retrieving it gives her a break, and she’s suddenly grateful for this dive of a diner, on this drab street. A little annoyance, something real that she has to deal with, gives her somewhere to plant her feet and deal with Rachel’s switchback temper. One moment despair, the next ambition. It’s been like this since day one, and it’s literally, entirely, why she fell for Rachel in the first place, but God - it means she has to be the responsible one. The no-fun one. The one who says things like: “You’re certifiable. You know that, don’t you?”

“Am not. Listen, you.” Rachel settles in, leaning into Chloe’s eyeline and doing this thing with her eyebrows that’s half insolent and half salacious. “We didn’t come this far for quiet nights in, listening to Vandal-in-507 jerk off over mondo movies or whatever sick shit he’s into. We came to live the dream and tear up this town, so let’s get out and do it.”

Chloe starts to say ‘we didn’t come out here to fuck this up’, but before she’s halfway through deciding where that sentence is even going, Rachel’s hands are closed around her cheeks and Rachel’s lips are closed on hers and even if she tastes of cheap gritty diner waffles she makes them taste like heaven. Chloe’s heart flutters harder than her eyelids, and both those things slow and still and shut down until Rachel pulls away, a few seconds or half an eternity later.

“Are you gonna do that every time I dare to question you?” she finally manages to say, once time has started up again and the world’s fallen into place and the hoodie-indoors edgelord sitting alone by the payphone has shaken his head and gone back to the Camus novel he’s pretending to read.

“Are you gonna make me?” Rachel props her chin on her hands, staying low and close. Chloe sighs, nibbling at her lower lip, and brushes her free hand’s worth of fingertips through Rachel’s hair before she sets them down on her wallet.

“Split the difference. Ten bucks tonight, the rest tomorrow. A girl’s got to eat.”

“How much fun do you think we can have on ten bucks, in Santa Monica?”

“If Rachel Freaking Amber has to pay for her own drinks anywhere on God’s clean Earth…”

Rachel smirks, relaxing her hands and leaning back. “Challenge accepted. Prepare to be humiliated, designated driver.”

“No truck, no sobriety. Them’s the rules.”

“Ugh. Fine. But my powers are weak when I smell like road filth and hard labour. We need to do something about that.”

“And I guess you don’t wanna clean the shower on your first day back in LA?”

“I’m open to literally any better idea.”

* * *

“OK, OK.” Rachel laughs, making a half-hearted swipe at the bottle. “This was totally a better idea of mine that you happened to have.”

Chloe rolls her eyes - a little theatrically, and a little genuinely, and maybe a little drunkenly. They’d stopped at a bodega, cracked their ten-dollar bill for a tall bottle of Pacifico (and God bless Chloe’s fake ID), and now they’re weaving their way down the beach, bathed in the neon lights and the second-hand sound and the soft roar of the misty Pacific. They’re not alone - there are knots of people dotted here and there across the dunes, small knots of surfers further out while the light lasts and they can see the shore, but if they turn their eyes out to sea, it’s just possible for them to fool themselves.

It’s… more or less how they planned it, at least, and as Chloe lowers herself gracelessly onto the sand, she’s actually grateful at last. One of these days they’ll get shit right first time.

“I mean it.” Rachel cosies up to Chloe, smiles that brilliant the-world-ends-with-me smile, and rests her head on Chloe’s shoulder. “I’ve wanted this for so long, but you actually made it happen. And every time it goes wrong, you’ve made things right again.”

“Aw, crap. I was hoping you weren’t noticing.” Chloe lets her head loll down, her cheek on Rachel’s soft mist-sparkling hair, one arm draped around Rachel and the other rescuing the bottle from untimely, sandy doom.

“Of course I notice. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Even though I kept you in Arcadia Bay for two whole years?”

“You made Arcadia Bay bearable for two whole years, babe. And you kept your promise. You left with me.”

“Not like there was jack shit to keep me there.” One deep pull on the bottle, and Chloe passes it over, propping her weight on that arm. “Mom’s prolly happier being Mrs. David Madsen without me hanging around calling her on it, and… everyone else is dead, or in Seattle.”

“C’mon, Chloe, don’t even try that fake nihilistic thing. You fool almost everyone, but not me.” Rachel downs a mouthful of beer, and plants the bottle emphatically in the sand. “You’re not running away _from_ anything, you’re running away _with_ me. Because you love my ass. And because deep down inside you’re the most positive person on Earth. You even talked my junkie mom into giving herself a second chance.”

“Eh. Sera never really wanted to give up on you, y’know? All I had to do was shut her down.” Chloe shrugs, as well as she can with one shoulder taking her weight and one shoulder bearing most of Rachel’s. “Hey, is she still in Long Beach? We should totally look her up.”

“Maybe? You know how much she sucks with return addresses. Last I heard she was in town, but that was Christmas. She could be halfway to Las Vegas by now and I wouldn’t know ‘til Thanksgiving. She called on my birthday, but I was out of it; totally forgot to ask her where she was.”

“Don’t remind me. I got so swept up with the truck, and squaring shit with Frank…”

“Shut _up_ , will you? Just - shit, just look up there. You see that Ferris wheel? You see us? You, and me, and Santa Monica beach at sunset, and this crappy Mexican beer? You did this. You got us here.” Rachel pulls away from Chloe, thin-lipped and sincerely tipsy now, but before she’s straightened up to look her in the eye Chloe’s toppled over into the sand. 

Before Chloe can recover, Rachel pounces, pinning her down by the shoulders and smiling that smile again. Her hands have snuck inside Chloe’s jacket, and she squeezes Chloe’s collarbone, her nails digging in around Chloe’s thin strappy top. Short-circuited - she does this every time - Chloe can only reach up with the one hand that’s sort of free, toying with Rachel’s feather earring, rubbing her knuckles against Rachel’s cheek.

“Seriously,” says Rachel, more softly than before. “This is all I ever wanted from you. You’ve given me everything. A whole future.” She leans in to Chloe’s fingers, her eyelids slowly batting closed and open again, and she’s never looked more like the lioness she is. “I fucking love you, Chloe Price.”

* * *

It’s in that jubilant mood, an hour later, ocean-fresh and still smelling of sea salt, with only drips left in the bottle, that Chloe allows herself to be swept along.

“You know what?” Rachel says, halfway home with a gleam in her eye. “I still can’t do it. I can’t just go home and sleep in that bed sober.”

“Saw this coming,” says Chloe, _sotto-voce_ , and out loud: “So what, the night is young, and so are we, let’s party?”

“You need persuading?”

“Hell no,” because seriously, screw being the responsible one all the time. “But we’ve gotta keep it local.”

“How about that place?” Rachel points over Chloe’s shoulder, and she cranes around and up to check out the tallest building on the street - four floors of arches and tall windows, the uppermost in darkness, the rest already faintly glowing a slightly freakish neon pink. The sign, stark in its dark and white between the third and fourth storeys, reads ‘The Asylum’.

‘The Asylum’ is everything Chloe’s expected, and less. It’s a hollowed-out old movie theatre, maybe even a real theatre, scratched and worn by years of spiky heels and combat boots, wallpapered in posters for identikit bands. _How many pale, ethereal girl singers fronting for surly sub-rock guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? Actually, we prefer the dark._

There are a lot of dark corners in here. Lights pulse and flicker, migraine-bright, over a dancefloor where the seats used to be, and a stage where the screen used to be, and a bar where the ticket office used to be - but they come and go, and what they mostly do is highlight the holes and corners behind speaker stacks or under the balcony. The Asylum’s full of hiding places.

As for the music… it’s got a beat. You could dance to it, if you didn’t mind dancing in slow-mo. Maybe that’s what’s with the giant shoes - slowing them the fuck down so they don’t start having fun? It’s all synthetic - bumps, squeaks, throbs, and a dead-inside European-sounding girl dropping deep thoughts like she doesn’t give a shit if you care or not.

> Time is like a bullet from behind  
>  I run for cover, just like you  
>  Time is like a liquid in my hands  
>  I swim for dry land, just like you  
>  Time is just a fiction of my mind  
>  I will survive, and so will you  
>  And so will you  
>  And so will you

The girl’s voice dissolves in carefully engineered skips. Chloe looks down the length of her arm, to Rachel’s hand, and back up. They are not dressed for this place — Chloe maybe, if her dye job wasn’t washing out and she’d worth a proper jacket, Rachel definitely not (and it’s a shame, ‘cause Chloe knows she swiped a pair of pointy boots from drama lab before they left). But fortunately, the eyes in the place are not on them. Chloe follows Rachel’s gaze to the dancefloor, to a spot just below the stage, and breathes: "Whoa."

The woman dancing - occupying centre stage without doing anything so crass as being on it - is probably about Rachel’s height, but between the platforms and the pigtails and the sheer projective force that radiates off her, she looks like a giantess. And, to be fair to Rachel, and to three quarters of the people in the Asylum tonight, she’s stacked. Her… underboob-corset-whateverthefuck looks impossibly tight - it’s amazing she can breathe in that getup, let alone dance, and it’s making a full-on hourglass of her. Chloe snaps her fingers on the edge of Rachel’s vision - and in the corner of her eye, the dancer twirls and turns, breaking a contact Chloe wasn’t quite sure was there.

"Eyes on the Price, Rachel."

“Oh, come on. You were staring too.”

Chloe pokes out her tongue. “You think she has room for three in her coffin?”

“One way to find out.”

The song bleeps, crashes, and drones its way into a beat of barely-there quiet, the next gliding in smoothly; something heavier that growls in off the back of blended keyboard beeps and boops. The dancing girl rolls her head - probably her eyes too - and stalks off the floor in triumph. Rachel hops onto the bar footrest and makes puppy eyes at the tattooed bulk behind it; Chloe’s only half-listening until a bottle of Tecate slides into her hand. Her attention is focused upward, onto the balcony that curves around the Asylum’s rear wall. There’s something up there that’s nagging at her attention, sucking it in the way a loose tooth attracts the tongue. Something she can’t see but should be able to; something she can feel but not quite pick out; something that distracts her from how fast she’s drinking. She’s halfway through the bottle before the song is over.

Rachel’s “You OK?” intertwines with another intervention on her reverie (the atmosphere’s getting to her, she decides, thinking in bad poetry already). The dancing girl’s planted a boot on the bar footrest, between Chloe and Rachel, and she’s looking from one to the other with a broad smile. She’s not even broken a sweat, and if her pallor’s makeup, it’s a fucking work of art, because it’s all still there.

“Well hello, beautiful.” Her eyes flicker from Rachel to Chloe and back again. Who’s she talking to? Either? Both? Her voice is smooth, and syrupy - it sounds the way cough medicine tastes, complete with a slightly sickly undertone and that sense of relief that something’s finally slipped down and settled your throat. “So glad you’re not drinking only with thine eyes.”

“We’re on a low budget tonight,” Rachel practically purrs back; typical. Drama queen can never say no to a challenge. “You know how it is; new in town, not a penny to our names. Help a sister out?”

“Oh, would that I could, sweetmeat, but my sister gets so crabby when I give the goods away!” The dancer licks her lips - a quick left to right and back again, and then her wide, slick smile closes. “And your guardian angel’s looking furious already. Hell hath no fury like a bluebird scorned…”

Chloe bites her tongue - almost literally. Something about this woman is getting to her, turning her thoughts sour - she keeps wanting to stare and look away at the same time. She takes a long pull on her drink, steadying herself, squeezing the cold glass tight until she has some focus back. “God, Rachel. Is everyone in Santa Monica tripping balls, or have we just been unlucky?”

“Oh, don’t be jealous, duckling! Never would I ever come between you. Some people are just forever.” The dancer clasps her hands over her chest, tips her head, bats her eyes and smiles just a little bit too hard. The one thing she doesn’t do is actually move. “But forever is such a long, long time, and most of it hasn’t even happened yet…”

Chloe tips her head, looks the girl up and down, and frowns. “You should publish. The Little Book of Gothy Bullshit, by A. Fashion Victim.”

The girl’s head bobs back, and she focuses on Chloe properly for the first time, looking at her and through her, like she’s reading a script off the back of Chloe’s skull. Her eyes are off-colour - they almost look like they belong to different people. One’s green, and a little feline - one’s blue and crystal clear.

“Rude, dude!” she laughs, in a passable impression of Chloe’s accent. For a fragment of a fraction of a second Chloe sees the blonde pigtails turn blue, sees her own face looking back at her, ashen and wearing a lascivious pout she’d never sink to putting on her own lips. “And it’s Jeanette, by the way.” The moment passes; Jeanette’s face is her own again, and Chloe’s falling off her stool, scrabbling as the world falls back into place. Rachel looks across to her, blinks, and slides off her own stool, like she’s been freeze-framed and restarted.

“What the hell did you do to her?”

Jeanette laughs - giggles, like an overgrown schoolgirl, pigtails bobbing. “Rawr! Nothing a competent psychiatrist can’t fix, little lioness!” She steps off at last, flashing a mouthful of sharp, pretty, perfect teeth. “But don’t worry. Tampering with possessions is a state offence, and I’m _never_ offensive.”

Suddenly serious, she looks straight into Rachel’s eyes, and says something Chloe misses as she clambers to her feet. All the colour seems to fade from Rachel’s face, all the fight seems to drain out of her and into the floor Chloe’s still half stuck to. She backs away, sets her drink on the bar (where it sways, circles, and finally topples), and storms out.

Chloe hasn’t seen her give up without a fight, ever. She scrambles after Rachel, glaring over her shoulder at Jeanette, who bats her eyes and calls after the retreating girls, with her hands locked together in mock-prayer. She says something - a waste of words, as far as Chloe’s concerned, cut off by the swing and the slam of the doors in Chloe’s wake.

“Was it something I said?”

* * *

“I’m fine,” says Rachel, out of doors, in the brisk, barely-contained ‘not fine at all’ tone she uses when she’s thirty seconds from smashing the nearest thing with the nearest other thing. Chloe knows this game of old. Rachel’s going to blow up sooner or later - what Chloe has to do now is get her out of the way, contain the detonation, stop her starting shit she can’t finish.

“Rache, that place sucked balls anyway. Thank God they didn’t have a door charge…”

“Ugh. That’s not the point. I fucking hate being played like that.”

“What the shit did she say to you?”

Rachel ignores her, stalking over to a three-quarters-empty newspaper dispenser and kicking it. Not hard - she’s just getting warmed up - but the fuse is lit and the barrel’s there at the other end of it, and no gust of sea air nor heavier and heavier fog blowing in off the Pacific are going to put it out, but there are ways to work with Rachel. Corral her. Manage her. If push comes to shove, distract her - and Chloe still has half a bottle of Tecate up her sleeve.

“C’m’ere.” Chloe pulls out the bottle, keeping it behind her back, extending her other arm and waggling her fingers, drawing Rachel in, and tugging on her shirt when she doesn’t take the hint. “She fucked with me too, remember? At least you didn’t fall on your ass just because she introduced herself.”

“Yeah. What the hell was _that_ about?”

“This is going to sound nuts, but - her face changed. Like - she looked like me for a second, when she did the voice? And then poof, gone again.”

“Really?” Rachel narrows her eyes, and bats Chloe’s hand away. _Whoops_. “Chloe, that’s… horseshit.”

“Cross my heart. She looked like me.” Chloe lets her hand drop, delves it into her pocket, folds herself into her overshirt - partly against the steadily more insistent fog, creeping and crawling through her sleeves and settling into them, but partly because it makes her look weak, and right now, that’s what she’s counting on. She whips the bottle around, takes a pull, and mock-shudders. “If this shit wasn’t bottled I’d think the bar guy fucking spiked me. Remember when we took that acid on July Fourth?”

Rachel quirks a half-hearted effort at her brilliant smile - disarming, charming, and meant as a distraction while she lifts the bottle. “God, yes. You crawling all over me, ‘cause you thought you were flying and you’d got vertigo, and I was just staring at your sleeve, and…”

“… and you said ‘why don’t you just climb down the ivy’, and you kept saying it, you… total jackass.”

Rachel laughs, and downs all but a mouthful of Chloe’s beer, and this time she does hug Chloe, arms locking around her shoulders. “I said I was sorry, too.”

“You were pretty goddamn eloquent, fo’sho’.” Mission accomplished. Kind of. From years of experience, Chloe knows she’s strung a few more yards on the fuse, but this is going to rattle around Rachel’s head until she’s ready to spill. “C’mon. Let’s go home."


End file.
